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Queering the Human: Is the Transhuman already here?

By B.P. Morton

I was assigned human at birth. My parents were both pretty human at the time. I've coded as human to most people who meet for most of my life. Nonetheless I'm not particularly convinced that I count as human these days. Maybe, maybe not. Part of my goal here is to think through it, partially as a response to D. Goldgaber's post here, and partly in preparation for the reading group we're doing on David Roden's work here. If I was assigned human at birth, but no longer am, I suppose that would make me transhuman.

I am not the biggest fan of most Transhumanism. I pretty suspicious of the powers, timetables, success rates, unadvertised side effects, and distributions across income levels of visits from the technology fairy. A lot of the visions of transhumanism that I have seen in the past seem to me extremely over-optimistic about the ability of technology to save us from long term problems and the capital available to do so. Many versions of Singularitanism seem like exercises in delusional economic fantasy to me, although in fairness, many are intended that way. Despite all this, I suppose I am a transhumanist myself. We ourselves transgress the boundaries of the human. I certainly try to. Smart, daring, motivated people (OK, foolish, risk-taking, driven people) have been doing their best to transgress the boundaries of the human for a long time in many ways. The community of philosophical interlocutors is already weirder and more diverse than we usually give it credit for, so that anthropocentrisms are often misleading hold overs from schools of thoughts that wanted to assume more unity and defaultism to the philosophical project than we can afford to. And I have good hope that we're going to get weirder and more diverse from here. Probably not as completely and rapidly as I badly want, but I do think that is our collective trajectory.

When we are thinking about transgender people there are two main definitions in common use, and I think the tension between them helps shed some light on the near-human areas of the transhuman and posthuman. The more restrictive definition of transgender, lets say transgender1, is someone who currently has a gender identity different than the one they were assigned at birth. That would include transmen, transwomen, genderfluid folk, and non-binary people (like me). The broader definition, lets say transgender2 (often trans*), is someone who transgresses the traditional boundaries of gender. In our culture, that includes all the types I mentioned before, but also drag folk, crossdressers (called transvestites in many places other than the US), and gender non-conforming people, who typically still have the gender identity they were assigned at birth, but habitually do transgressive things with it. In a sense, the issue is whether we think of trans as a verb, or as an long term state of being. Trans* folk who are not transgender1, are, as it were, habitually transgressing the boundaries of traditional gender, but aren't making a permanent camp on the other side. (Also transgender2 is probably the older meaning, see Cristan William' excellent work on the history of the terminology). Similarly, I suppose, a transhuman2, or trans*human, would be someone who habitually transgresses the boundaries of the human, but may not yet have made a long-term camp on the other side, whereas a transhuman1, or transhuman narrowly defined, would be someone who has a non-human identity despite being assigned human at birth. Two twiddles. First, otherkin, probably fit even that restrictive definition of transhuman1, and yet are very much NOT what most transhumanists are envisioning in their philosophizing and future visioning, and the culture of otherkin is far divorced from the high-tech, high-capital culture of most transhumanism. I'm not sure how to resolve this, whether to redefine or to insist that transhumanism as it already plays out in our time is already different than usually imagined. Second, someone who was assigned some sort of non-human identity at birth or creation or whatever, but later came to identify as a human, as for example in the story of Pinochio, would be transhuman in both these senses, but would no longer be posthuman, but rather human. The boundary can be crossed, or at least pushed on, in either direction. I think that is right, and an important distinction between transhuman and posthuman. Perhaps someday AIs will long for and achieve transition to traditional humanity.

I had a previous post (here) asking what would it take to convince us that someone was of a race other than they were assigned at birth. Most transhumanism wants to focus on beings that have diverged from humanity quite a bit. Roden is interested in how much we can think philosophically about “unbounded weirdness.” I guess I'm wanting to meditate about the very near-human borders. What is the least it would take to convince us that a being wasn't really a human being anymore? Does 99% human, mean 1% other-than-human, and therefore not fully human and therefore transhuman albeit barely so? Or does 99% human “round-off” to human? What about 95%, or 85% or cases where the % metaphor breaks down? I'm not sure, but once upon a time I used all of these rationalizations to convince myself I “rounded-off” to male, and I now think that was the source of much suffering for me, so I'm both intrigued and suspicious about reflections on the near-human. In general we reject essentialism when thinking carefully about class, gender, race, and so on, but it creeps back into our intuitions over and over when we begin thinking about particular questions. And if we ask about species it becomes tempting again. But even at the level of biology, the homo genus has had a bunch of different species and the boundaries between them are often unclear, or even have evidence of some fluidity, and important differentiations within species.

In this sense, I'm somewhat convinced that I am at least trans*human, if not transhuman narrowly defined, and that trans*humanism is part of the story of the past and present as well as the future. Why? Well at the very least I'm a cyborg. A fairly minimalist cyborg, but a cyborg. I have a titanium replacement stomach valve that has been an inorganic and artificial aspect of my body since I was an infant. It is part of who I am, but not one I notice or pay attention to. Already I think this means that I'm technically not 100% human. My being is more than human being. But so far this is trivial and uninteresting. Second, I'm extremely near-sighted and have been since little, so my eyeglasses very much seem to be a part of me. This has a whole host of actual effects on my phenomenology and self. I have two modes of vision, with and without my glasses, and different uses for each, and experiences of each. My heavy dependence on (fragile, expensive) glasses means there are many physical activities I refuse to participate in for fear of losing or breaking my glasses. My ability to use eye make-up is severely limited by the fact that if I take my glasses off to get at my eyes, I can't see my face well enough in a mirror to even put on make up. My glasses are the first thing I reach for in the morning and the last thing I remove at night. My computer, or purse seem like tools. Tools I use a LOT, but tools. But my glasses don't. They seem like slightly detachable inorganic parts of me like my hair or fingernails. Lastly, my wedding ring hasn't been taken off for more than a few minutes at a time in over a decade. It isn't easy to remove it when I try. It codes as part of my body to me. When it is off, my body feels wrong. We usually think of medical enhancements or replacements when we think of cyborgs or cybernetics. But in actual practice, past, present, and future, I suspect that symbolic prostheses, inorganic parts that play a social role, or a role in meaning-systems are at least as important as more physically or neurologically effective inorganic parts of us. I have a tattoo too, and I suppose this is in some sense another inorganic, symbolic prosthesis to my body.

Still that seems well within the boundaries of what is normal for humans, right? Humans have been tool-users for tens of thousands or years or more (depending on where we think the boundaries between the human and the pre-human lay). Tattoos are ancient tech, and wedding rings, eyeglasses, and even titanium stomach valves are all varying levels of old-tech. But this doesn't really answer the question. Perhaps transhuman people have been a minority within the broader human population for some time, but haven't been recognized as such. Perhaps humanity has long been diverse enough that “human” isn't the right level of detail to understand people at, but more of a logical “lowest common denominator.” Some strains of Buddhism, for example, teach that people come in 5 spiritual “families” or “clans” (kula I think), and that you should take slightly different approaches to the spiritual path depending on which “family” of people you belong to. The nuns at my wife's work are fond of the ennegram (of personality) which hypothesizes that human psyches tend to develop into one of 9 slightly different patterns of ego and personality function. More traditional psychology has lots of theories of “person”ality development and differentiation, including for example the Myers-Briggs system. When we are actually building our self-identities, we work hard to differentiate ourselves from others, there is an outward pressure of diversity, ramification, and differentiation in many directions. At what point does the outward tendency of ourselves become more salient than the re-centering pressure of re-affirming our joint humanity? I don't know, but I feel the tension.

My dad, for example, is quite a bit more cybernetic than I am. He has lived with diabetes for many years. Once he had a routine of taking blood sugar readings with strips and a machine and administering synthetic insulin to himself periodically based on his findings. But as prostheses have gotten better he's very much adapted with them, and was an early adapter to continuous glucose monitoring insulin pump systems. These are belt-mounted devices that have permanent attachments into the blood stream to measure blood glucose and administer insulin continuously, in a literal cybernetic feedback system. This effects my dad's every waking moment, actually helping to stabilize his mood quite a bit. But despite this, my dad has steadfastly resisted thinking in cyborg terms. He gives his machines names, and thinks of them as outside himself, if attached to him. He uses symbiotic metaphors whenever he is explaining his relationship to the machines that are continuously monitoring and effecting his bloodstream. If my dad has sur-human mediation of his daily phenomenological experience, he nonetheless doesn't have transhuman self-understanding. He thinks of himself as thoroughly human, with an interestingly close symbiotic relationship with machinery.

But other people and groups think more explicitly in terms of exiting humanity. I overheard body builders in the gym the other day talking about becoming “more than human” and asked them about it. They said it was a common metaphor in their circle for the few folks who have the drive to push themselves beyond the boundaries of what is usually achievable by humans. They said that yeah, they did feel that their deep lifestyle dedication to an odd goal alienated them from most other humans to some extent, that they felt like a tribe onto themselves. When I asked about posthumanism, they were sheepish but said that yeah that was their goal in bodybuilding. In some of the circles I run in, neurodivergent folks sometimes talk about their sense of alienation from neurotypical folks, of their othering from the mass of humanity. I've heard people use transhuman talk about themselves because of neurodiversity issues. Public neurodiversity material usually emphasizes it is about diversity within humanity, and thus not about trans*humanist diversity, but I'm not sure adherents to neurodiversity movements always think this way. In traditional Buddhism, Buddha describes himself as being born human, but being no longer human, because of the mental states he achieved while being human. (Technically he is mahapurusa, “superhuman” as are chakravartins like Bharat, but for different reasons, in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism.) (OK, actually the extent to which the Buddha is supposedly “just human” (in some modern Theravada) or “the superlative human” (Anuradha Sutta SM 44.2), or supernaturally nonhuman (the Mahasamgikan line), or transhuman but for thoroughly natural reasons (the common older line) is complex). I have yet to personally hear anyone who already thinks that they actually already are transhuman, (besides otherkin), but I think folks in many corners, even outside of the transhumanist mainstream such as it is, are beginning to toy with the idea, or consider themselves close. I suspect transhuman identity is in the very early stages of formation.

The thing that really re-opens the question of transhumanism for me, personally, is my own transgender status. Roden's Speculative Posthumanism is all about the hypothesis that technology may eventually allow beings that are broadly descended from humans, but are radically weird compared to humans. But I myself, am already pretty weird. I'm undergoing a second puberty. Not a lot of humans do that. That right there puts a big distance between me and the vast majority of humans. I've experienced my own mind in pre-pubescent, testosterone-dominated, and estrogen-dominated states over long times. And it makes a difference. It's subtle and hard to put a finger on, but it is definitely a part of my experience. And its an experience that both connects me to and sets me apart from vast chunks of humanity. Oh and I'm not just trans, but non-binary, I have a foot in two camps that are often thought to have no middle state. I have seriously monkeyed with my own body and own nature in order to try to be more myself. How weird is weird enough? How alienated from humanity at large is alienated enough? Morphological freedom? That fight is my daily existence. "I'm trans, but am I trans enough?" is an extremely familiar line of worry in the transgender community, but does it apply to transhumanism too? Am I, are any of us, already transhuman "enough" to claim the term as a self-description?

And other transfolks have been even more ambitious than I in pressing the boundaries of exploratory being. Consider the Rothblatts for example. Christine Rothblatt was a satellite engineer and became one of the richest transpeople in the US. She's a long time staunch supporter of full on uploading minds, singularity-is-near-style transhumanism and is the founder of transhumanist Terasem Movement. Her wife Bina Rothblatt is the model for the robot BINA48, a robot designed to be an early experiment in embodying uploaded human consciousness (of Bina). Bina and Martine have further worked to treat BINA48 as much as possible as a member of the family. BINA's files are designed based on hundreds of hours compiling Bina Rothblatt's memories, feelings, and beliefs, along the “mindfile” theories of the Terasem movement, and further BINA48 self-alters based upon continuing conversations with other humans and its own web-research. I know of no other similar attempts to actually treat robots or AIs as members of a family, although perhaps there are some. (And yes BINA48 is an, er, near-person of color? Can robots have a race? Seems that way, especially if they are designed to attempt to embody a human with a race...). BINA48 is clearly an artificial mechanical being, but one designed to emulate or electronically embody a currently still living human. Is BINA48 1% human and 99% non-human? IDK. What's the right term for the relationship between BINA48 and Martine? Partial-wives? Alternate embodiment of wife? If there is a case to be made for existing non-humans successfully becoming partially human, I know no better case than BINA48.

Or consider the strange life of Genesis P-Orridge, one of my personal hero/ines, about whom even basic ontology becomes linguistically fraught and contestable. I'm not even sure how to talk about Genesis without “deadnaming” h/er, so I hope I can be forgiven. Genesis began life as two separate humans, named Jacquelin Mary Breyer and Neil Andrew Megson. These two grew up. Neil legally changed h/er name to Genesis P-Orridge in 1971 (at age 21), and eventually became an important and influential avant-garde musician. I know h/er mostly as the front person for Throbbing Gristle, one of the very first Industrial bands. S/he also led Psychic TV. In 1993 Genesis began the “Pandrogeny Project” in which Jacquelin and Genesis attempted to merge into a single being named Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, to the extent that they were able. Largely s/he altered h/erselves to more closely resemble each other, in being as well as appearance, and attempted to merge h/er lives and experiences. S/he used hormones, extensive surgical body alterations, legal marriage, occultist rituals, and avant-garde art all in the attempt to effect as complete merger as possible. Genesis identifies as gender neutral and as a thorough but imperfect mix of h/er two original identities. In 2007 the body of Genesis that was assigned female at birth died. Genesis' understanding of this situation is that s/he is now partly alive and partly dead, and has being both in the realm of the living and the dead. Is Genesis Breyer P-Orridge human? Is s/he one human or two humans (one of which is now dead)? If there is a case to be made for someone who already has a transhuman identity, I know of no better example than the life of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

If I were guessing, I would guess that transfolk and disabled folk will consistently lead the way into transhumanism. Why? Well, technologies aimed at seriously altering non-trivial aspects of human being, are going to have to go through experimental phases where they are expensive, of doubtful safety, and socially unfamiliar. That means there will be a lot of risks and costs. Which means the early adapters will need to be highly motivated to bear the risks. Taking feminizing hormones and going through a second puberty is expensive, not covered by my insurance, probably increases my risk of breast cancer and some heart and bone problems, and subjects me to some pretty steep social headwinds. And it's not even particularly experimental anymore, Harry Benjamin started experimenting with HRT to treat trans patients in 1948. But in many ways it is still edgy. So why do I do it? Because it makes me feel vastly more comfortable, more myself, it helps me cope with my gender dysphoria. When South African doctors performed the first successful penis transplant after many failed attempts, earlier this year, trans-men around the world got excited, even though it's likely to have a terrible success rate for years to come. When we first get viable chromosomal altering technologies (via nano or tailored viruses perhaps), I'll be lots transfolk sign up for the early testing, even though the early protocols are sure to be atrocious in many ways. Similarly, I'm not particularly disabled myself, but I'll bet that many smart, rational disabled people are willing to bear risks and costs that would make most able-bodied folks' blood run cold, in hopes of mitigating some of the problems they live with. Do some disabled people identify strongly with their prostheses? I'll bet. Do they think of themselves in cyborg terms more strongly than abled-bodied folks? Sometimes, I'll bet. Certainly where I am most disabled is where I most think of myself in cyborg terms. Do they think of themselves as “cyborg enough” to be (barely) transhuman? Especially when they feel most alienated from the mainstream of humanity? I don't know. Anyone know folks who think that way?

So there is a real risk of people spinning my musing and speculations as trying to argue that trans people and disabled people aren't really human, or soon won't be. That could look extremely politically regressive or dangerous. After all, “human” is the seat of “human rights” at the moment. There is a long tradition in the West of thinking of non-humans as “less than human” rather than “left of human” or “better than human” (especially outside of religious contexts where angels or deities or such might seem non-human but not less than human). I certainly don't want to say that I, or Genesis P-Orridge, or other trans folks, or disabled folks who might embrace cyborgism in deeper ways than the average person, are somehow less than human. I think “person” is probably a more relevant category than “human” in most cases, even if things I dislike about corporate law sometimes obscures this point. Nor am I trying to argue that early forms of transhumanism, are particularly better than human. I think “left of human,” is probably the best we can hope for at this point, and human-but-pressing-on-the-left-border-of-humanity is at least as likely. It is scary to even suggest maybe stepping outside of the umbrella of humanity. Certainly speciesqueer otherkin folk get no end of shit and ridicule from most quarters. The furry lifestyler is as animated by trans*humanist ambitions as the AI researcher, but the former get mockery and their conventions bombed and the latter don't. Queering humanity seems at least as tempting as queering gender, or attraction, or beauty standards, or social norms. In an important sense, transhumanism is part of the queer agenda.

David Roden points out that we can't really have an account of transhumans or posthumans, without a philosophical account of what it means to be human. And my account here is - man, I don't know. But whatever it is, I wanna rebel against it! I want to be ME, not the lowest-common denominator of all humans. Or the “default” picture of the well-off, white, male, cis, straight, able, neurotypical human. Terry Pratchett says “Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.” (well actually he says it in all caps, but that's another story). Well this ape wants to rise away from its apeiness, from even its humanity. Perhaps it is constitutive of humanity to want to transgress against one's own humanity. But some folks seem to put more emphasis on transgressing their humanity than others. Roden talks about Speculative Posthumanism, and Critical Posthumanism, maybe what I'm trying to feel my way around, is a kind of Existentialist Transhumanism. Perhaps we feel both an alterity within ourselves distancing our selves from others who seem similar to us, but also a pull of solidarity with others who seem similar to us, and these act in tension creating categories of identity. But the categories aren't necessarily stable either, and our outbound urge drives us to transcend the categories socially constructed around us, even at last our humanity.

Our shared humanity is one of the great shibboleths of the left. But so is the genuine valuing of diversity. Anthropocentrism has a host of philosophical problems. But one of them I suspect is that folks are diverse enough, and diversity is important enough to being as we are, that anthropos has many centers rather than one. Humanity is an unhelpful stereotype. Queerness de-centers normative defaults arguing for deep seated plurality and diversity. There are many ways to be in intimate relations with others healthily and appropriately, rather than only one model, or even one strongly favored central default model. There are many ways to experience and express your own genderedness, even if two are fairly common, they are not therefore somehow normatively superior to other ways to be. I suspect the same impulse queers humanity, pushing us to ways of being that may often transcend strictly human being, and seek to see other forms of personhood as different but not less than human personhood. Roden's picture of far-from-human posthumans is as “unboundedly weird” - if we say “unboundedly queer” instead, perhaps we can see another set of links between contemporary identity politics and the more extreme possibilities imagined by transhumanists and posthumanists. And when we are engaging in our philosophizing we need to remember that the community of interlocutors already includes cyborgs, and trans folk, and multiples, and otherkin, and bodybuilders, and little people, and deaf folk, and neurodivergent folk, and plenty more, with plenty of deep and important differences among people.

PS – The trans*humanism of the present and past.

If we think of NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science) as the key technologies of the transhumanism of the future, then surgery, body-modification, drug-use, altered states of consciousness, and alternate conceptions of self, seem to be the key technologies of the trans*humanism of the present and past. Folks have struggled against their humanity for vast chunks of time. We know ice aged folks engaged in tattooing and trepanation, for example. Human castration goes back many thousands of years. What motivates people to engage in attempts to modify their bodies or minds? Well, often it is medical. They perceive themselves to have a problem and they want to fix it. Often it is normalizing. A person whose appearance is badly out of the local norms may try to alter themselves to fit in better. Sometimes it is idealizing. Trying to make their body or mind better fit some ideal of beauty of value. The Chinese binding the feet of females so they will be small in adulthood, Kayan females in Burma wearing an elaborate system of neck-rings to push down their clavicles and give their necks the appearance of great length in adulthood, etc. Sometimes the function is intentionally to set a person or group apart from others, or to display or embody an allegiance to a religion or ethnicity or particular ideal. Hebrew circumcision was thought of specifically to set them apart from other peoples, for example. And dealing with gender dysphoria is probably a common and ancient driver as well. Voluntary castration and breast removal existed in many ancient cultures, even when few other surgeries were practiced, and tend not to fit any of the other patterns. Often the symbolic and cultural functions of a body modification are rich and complex enough that it hard to categorize them in any of these ways. Subincision in Australia may be in part to normalize males by making them more closely resemble the marsupials of the continent, but it it also serves as a rite of initiation, and is thought to make the penis more vulva-like and thus may have had gender functions.

Shamans taking drugs to explore edgy forms of mentation are experimenting with their lives and being. Folks who surgically transform their bodies in ritualized ways in low-tech settings, for initiatory purposes are risking to transform who they are. Mystics who argue for radically different conceptions of self than are usual in a culture, and then elaborate exercises to slowly realize new forms of self, are in a sense experimenting with their own being too. The struggle to transcend and transform our own humanity is not a new one. Maybe we are closer now to thinking we might be on the brink of crossing the line, but the effort to cross over our humanity is very old, and shows up in many cultures in many ways. Clark argues in “natural born cyborgs” that in a sense cyborgism has been around since the paleolithic at least. And I think I agree, but one way of understanding the upshot of it is that trans*humanism is quite old, and that even transhumanism more narrowly thought might have deeper roots in the past than we usually credit. Certainly Buddhist understanding of the Enlightened Ones, Jainist understandings of the Ford-makers, and the Taoist search for immortality-in-this-world are all examples of extended transhumanist projects familiar to philosophical and religious history. If we currently disagree that alchemy or meditation will be sufficient to leap the gap between the human and the posthuman, nonetheless we should recognize the quest and goal to do so.

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Queering the Human: Is the Transhuman already here?

By B.P. Morton

I was assigned human at birth. My parents were both pretty human at the time. I've coded as human to most people who meet for most of my life. Nonetheless I'm not particularly convinced that I count as human these days. Maybe, maybe not. Part of my goal here is to think through it, partially as a response to D. Goldgaber's post here, and partly in preparation for the reading group we're doing on David Roden's work here. If I was assigned human at birth, but no longer am, I suppose that would make me transhuman.